Barbara would later explain that she and Frank had been in his private jet, he sitting across the aisle from her, when, like a schoolboy, he passed her a note. She unfolded it. It said, “I want to adopt Bobby.” It also said that he loved Bobby, wanted him to be his son, and felt that Bobby deserved to be “a part of a bigger family.” She would recall that her first impulse was to believe that Frank was joking, that it seemed very odd. In discussing it with her during the flight, Frank sent for Mickey, who was in another part of the jet. Mickey came to them and tried his best to discourage the idea. However, according to Barbara, Frank’s mind seemed to be made up; he told Mickey, “Just do it!”
Barbara recalled that when she got back to Los Angeles, she called Bobby and told him of Frank’s plan. Bobby, too, was against the idea of a formal adoption. She says that he specifically told her, “But, Mother, I don’t want to be adopted!” She says he told her that he thought it was very nice of Frank, but not what he wanted. “I pleaded his case to Frank,” she recounted, “but my pigheaded Italian husband was determined to go ahead with it.”
But maybe the idea of adopting Bobby wasn’t so far-fetched to Frank. After all, Frank did enjoy Bobby’s company; the two had a good relationship. They’d known each other for years before his mother had even married Frank. When the Marxes lived across the golfing green from Frank back in the early 1960s, Barbara had asked Frank to introduce Bobby to his screen idol, Marilyn Monroe. The next time Marilyn came to visit, Frank made the introduction, which thrilled the youngster. Bobby would even go on to become Frank’s road manager. After the passing of some years, Frank then decided he wanted to adopt him. While it may seem like an odd decision in retrospect, it wasn’t completely unusual in Sinatra’s circle. For instance, about five years earlier, Dean Martin had married his third wife, Catherine Mae Hawn, and ended up adopting her daughter, Sasha. (Of course, Sasha was a child, whereas Bobby was a grown man.)
However, Barbara’s versions of events loses some credibility when one considers that there were once plans afoot for her second husband, Zeppo Marx, to adopt Bobby when he was just a boy. This despite the fact that Zeppo hadn’t been very solicitous toward Bobby. In fact, she had sent Bobby off to a military academy shortly after meeting Marx because he didn’t want the kid around. After they got married, Zeppo built a new wing for Bobby at their Palm Springs home, just to keep him out of his hair. In the end, Bobby’s biological father, Robert Oliver, refused to allow the adoption. Despite this, Bobby assumed the surname of Marx anyway.
As far as Frank was concerned, he and Barbara weren’t the troublemakers in this debate. That was Mickey Rudin. The subject wouldn’t even have been open for debate had Mickey not sent out a family alert.
According to a source who worked at Mickey’s law firm, Rudin, Richman & Appel, Frank had a meeting with Mickey in his office and laid into him, wanting to know what right he had to tell his family his personal intentions where Bobby Marx was concerned. Ordinarily, Mickey would never have intervened as he had with Tina and, likely, Nancy. He was always the first to know all of Frank’s secrets, and he had always kept them to himself. However, he felt that this situation was different. First of all, Frank didn’t tell him it was a confidential secret. If he had, Rudin might have used more discretion. But maybe not. It really wasn’t that complex an issue for Mickey: If a grown man is adopted into a wealthy family, he argued, the wealthy family should at least know about it. When were they supposed to hear about it? At the reading of the will? In fact, Mickey reportedly said he had no regret about informing the Sinatra family. If Frank was angry and wanted to terminate his services, that was fine with Mickey. If Frank never wanted to speak to him again, that too was fine. Mickey did what he thought was best. By the time Frank left the meeting, he understood. He wished Mickey had kept his mouth shut, but anytime Mickey Rudin felt so strongly about something that he was willing to put his job on the line for it, Sinatra knew better than to just ignore it. He and Mickey had been in the trenches for thirty years; they were allowed to disagree.
Finally, Rudin did what he probably should have done in the first place. Apparently undaunted by his argument with Frank, he telephoned Nancy Sinatra Sr. “This thing is about to happen and there’s going to be no turning back,” he told Nancy. “If you’re going to do something about it, you’d better do it soon.”
“I will take care of it,” she said.
Nancy calmly hung up with Mickey. Then she called Frank. “I’d appreciate it if you would please drop the whole idea of adopting Bobby Marx,” she told him. “For me. And for the family.”
That was all it took. The adoption was off. Obviously, Nancy still had great influence over Frank, and perhaps it was because she so rarely used her persuasive power over him. However, if Nancy asked Frank to do something, he usually did it. In this case, she managed to finally put an end to the controversy over Bobby Marx’s adoption. However, this particular family war would leave a number of casualties in its wake. In fact, no one would ever quite get over it.
Frank’s Secret Annulment
Barbara wants a church wedding,” Frank Sinatra was saying. “So, how do we make this goddamn thing happen?”
It was January 1978 and Frank was in a meeting at his home with Mickey Rudin, a priest named Father Tom Rooney, and two other officials who, because of their ongoing duties with the Catholic Church, asked to not be identified.
“It’s a very nice thought, Frank,” Father Rooney said. “It can’t happen, though.”
“Why?” Frank asked.
“Because in the eyes of the church, you’re still married to Nancy,” he explained.
Frank was surprised. He and Nancy had been divorced for twenty-six years, since 1951. “That’s legal, isn’t it? ’Cause, pardon my English, Father, but Jesus Christ! I been married three times since then.”
Rooney laughed. He then explained that since Frank’s marriage ceremonies to Ava and Mia had not been performed with Catholic rites, they were not recognized as valid by the church. However, the 1939 union with Nancy that had taken place at Our Lady of Sorrow Church in Jersey City was not only a legitimate marriage but, as far as the Catholic Church was concerned, still binding; the church did not recognize divorce. In fact, as far as the church was concerned, Frank and Nancy would be married until one of them died. There was one solution, though, the priest explained. Frank could have the marriage to Nancy annulled.
“Out of the question,” said Mickey Rudin. He added that Nancy Sr. would never allow such a thing. “She’s more Catholic than the pope,” he said. “She’s not going to go for it.”
Frank mulled it over. “Well, I don’t see why not,” he said. “We can at least ask her, right?”
“Oh my God, Frank,” Mickey said. “After the adoption thing? Please tell me you’re joking.”
“What do you think, Father?” Frank asked, ignoring Mickey’s panic. The priest was noncommittal. He said that he would not make a recommendation one way or the other. He would just follow Sinatra’s directive and do whatever was asked of him.
“Well, there’s no harm in asking Nancy,” Frank decided, a faraway look in his eyes. He added that he didn’t want anything to do with the details. He just wanted the papers to be drawn up and then “let’s have one of your fellows here go and get Nancy’s signature on them.” Frank motioned to the other two men in the room, one of whom was a priest and the other a church official not in the clergy.
Mickey just shook his head in amazement. “Unbelievable,” he exclaimed.
“You got a problem with this?” Frank asked the lawyer. “What’s the matter? You don’t want Barbara to have a church wedding?”
“You think you got problems with your kids now?” Mickey asked, according to the witnesses. “Well, just wait until they got a load of this, Frank. You ain’t seen problems yet.”
Frank glared at Mickey. “Look, I got no problems with my kids,” he declared. “My kids are just fine. You just let me deal with my kids, all right?
You’re the one who’s gonna have problems,” he concluded. The two men stared each other down until, after a few tense moments, it was Frank who relented. “Look, I’m sorry I just shot off my mouth,” he told Mickey. “I know you got my family’s best interest at heart. I just need you to let me handle this thing, okay?” Mickey nodded. “Okay, this here meeting is over, fellas,” Frank concluded. “That’ll be all. Father, would you hang around a little? I’d like to talk to you privately.”
The meeting was adjourned.
Father Tom Rooney C.S.Sp. was the kind of man who, like Frank Sinatra, got things done. Nothing stood in his way, which was one of the reasons Frank so admired him. The two first met in 1975, having been introduced to each other by the singer Morton Downey. At one point when Dolly Sinatra was in the hospital, Frank called on Father Rooney to give her Communion.
Tom Rooney had actually been an oilman trying to make a fortune in the refinery business before he got the calling in 1956 at the age of thirty-two; he was ordained as a Spiritan priest, a Catholic order founded in the eighteenth century primarily to minister to sub-Saharan Africa. In 1967, Bishop Donal Murray sent him to Nigeria as a missionary, to raise funds for a hospital in Makurdi. In 1973, Father Rooney established a privately funded charity, the World Mercy Fund, that operated out of Alexandria, Virginia. Its first donation was of a million dollars from the famous hotelier Conrad Hilton. After Hilton led the way, Frank teamed up with Sammy Davis to give a concert, entire proceeds of which went to the organization. Since then, Rooney’s charity had built four hospitals in Africa. By 1978 it supported 110 nurses and an equal number of volunteers in eighteen Third World countries. “He’s a very calm, wise man,” Frank said of Father Rooney. “Father Rooney can give solace to anyone.” Barbara agreed. “He’s down-to-earth, part of the real world. I feel I can talk to him about anything because he understands the other side of life, outside of the priesthood.”
After Dolly Sinatra’s death, Frank turned to Father Rooney for consolation. Previously, Frank and his parents, Dolly and Marty, had never been very religious.
“Back in the thirties and forties in Hoboken, you never heard the Sinatras talk much about being Catholic,” said Joey D’Orazio. “Frank had his First Holy Communion, I remember, but Dolly just wanted him in on that because she liked the big ceremony behind it. Italians were God-fearing, though, even if they didn’t go to church every Sunday. The one time I remember Frank really going to church was when he was nominated for an Oscar for From Here to Eternity. The entire month before the ceremony, he went to Good Shepherd Church in Beverly Hills to pray that he’d win—which of course he did. But for the most part, in Frank’s world, he was God. End of story.
“You’d never catch Dolly in church either, except when she got older. I once asked Frank about that, and he said, ‘Jesus! If Ma went to church, she’d try to change the whole damn thing. She’d have them doing different prayers, singing different songs. They’re better off without her, trust me.’ I know that Dolly became more religious in her sixties, when she actually started giving money to church charities.”
Dolly’s friend Doris Sevanto said, “Dolly once told me that she had a dream that she and Frankie and Marty were standing at the golden gates of heaven and couldn’t get in. In her dream she was shaking and rattling the gates until finally God came over and said, ‘Who the hell’s out there?’ And she said, ‘It’s us, dear Lord, it’s the Sinatras of Hoboken.’ And God said, ‘Who? Never heard of you. Get lost!’ Then he went back to his business. After that, Dolly said, she started going to church. Over a twenty-year period, she tried to convince Frank to take his religion more seriously, but he didn’t do so until after she died.”
Indeed, it would seem that it was his mother’s sudden death that had spurred Frank to a deeper investment in Catholicism. In searching for some logic and reason behind the senseless tragedy that had claimed Dolly, he turned to a faith he had never completely lost but had certainly ignored over the years. It would be Father Rooney who would help him come to terms with Dolly’s death. Frank would continue to donate a tremendous amount of money to the World Mercy Fund. In fact, he would give a concert at Carnegie Hall as a benefit for Rooney’s charity; more than four hundred patrons paid $1,000 a head for great seats to the show and then dinner with Frank and Barbara. The concert would yield $640,000 for the fund. Frank would also donate $150,000 for the building of a chapel in Dakar, Senegal. Some in his circle were a little cynical about Frank’s relationship to Father Rooney, though, like his daughter Tina, who would say, “Father Rooney would play Dad like a Stradivarius.”
It would be Father Rooney, then, to whom Frank would go for help in trying to find a way to make Barbara’s dream to marry in the Catholic Church a reality. In fact, ever since she converted, Barbara had wanted a church wedding. Whether she understood Catholic dogma or not, she says, however, that she did not encourage the idea of an annulment. But does it make sense that a smart woman like Barbara Marx, who actually had a friend who was a priest, wasn’t able to divine that an annulment of Frank’s first marriage would be necessary in order for her to have her church wedding? Still, though, like the adoption of Bobby, Barbara insisted that the annulment was all Frank’s idea.
“I knew the suggestion of an annulment would be controversial,” Barbara later recalled, “and I had no intention of getting involved. I hadn’t been with Frank all those years and learned nothing about keeping my nose out of his private affairs. In the end, he went ahead and organized it himself.”
“Mr. Rudin and I had a conversation with Mrs. Sinatra about it,” said one of the church officials who had been in on the original meeting where the idea of an annulment was raised. “She told Mr. Rudin, ‘This is Frank’s decision, not mine. I’m not getting in the middle of it. If he wants the family to know, I fully support it. If he doesn’t want the family to know, I fully support that as well.’ Rudin felt that Barbara might have some influence over the situation, however. ‘What makes you think I have sway over Frank Sinatra if you don’t?’ she asked him. ‘You’ve known the man for thirty years! Frank Sinatra does what he wants to do,’ she said. ‘No one tells my husband what to do, not even me.’ My impression was that she felt the possible annulment and remarriage was private between her and Frank, and that she would allow him to make the decision as to when to tell others.”
Barbara thought of herself as practical. She was decisive. She said that she wasn’t concerned about what anyone other than her husband thought about anything. While it certainly sounds like she was intentionally setting out to hurt Frank’s family members, she insists that this was not the case. She would explain that she was married to Frank, not to his ex-wife and not to his daughters. When she’d earlier come out and told Nancy Jr., “Just because we’re related doesn’t mean we have to be friends,” Nancy couldn’t help but be offended. “I suppose that’s true enough,” she later said of Barbara’s pointed observation, “especially if it’s a relationship through marriage rather than blood. Get comments like that, though, and you know where you stand. I think she’s a street fighter. Fortunately, I don’t have to see her very often.”
It had been Frank’s suggestion that one of the church officials with whom he and Father Rooney had met go to Nancy Sinatra with the annulment papers. Father Rooney decided it would be best if he handled the delicate matter himself. It’s not known how his meeting with Nancy went, since neither has ever spoken of it in specific terms. However, Father Rooney returned to Frank and Mickey with the news that Nancy had adamantly refused to sign the annulment papers. Mickey, who had made it clear from the outset what he thought of the idea, was not surprised. “You don’t annul a marriage that happened forty years ago and produced three grown children,” he told Frank. “Yeah, you do, if you want to bad enough,” was Frank’s response.
Frank did a little investigating on his own and learned that Nancy was very upset about her visit from Father Rooney. As far as she was concerned there would never be an annulmen
t. Typical of the family dynamic, she did not call Frank to ask him what he was thinking. Also typical of it, Frank didn’t approach her either. He just decided to work around her. Somehow, he and Father Rooney found a way; Frank’s marriage to Nancy was annulled. No one in the family seems to know how it occurred. It was just taken care of by Father Rooney at Frank’s direction.
This annulment was to be another secret Frank would keep to himself. After everything that had happened regarding Bobby’s possible adoption, he made sure Mickey Rudin kept this confidence. Recalled one attorney who worked with Rudin, “With the annulment, Sinatra laid it on the line. This was confidential. This was not to be shared with anybody. Mickey understood. My memory of it, though, was that Mickey didn’t actually know the annulment had even happened until it was all finalized, and by that time he was just as glad to not have to tell anyone about it.”
These sorts of unilateral decisions made by Frank Sinatra without much concern as to how they might affect others had begun to wear away at his long-standing relationship with Mickey Rudin. The two would have about another ten years in business together, but some of those years would be strained. Mickey had a loyalty not only to Frank but also to Frank’s first wife and the children. He didn’t like keeping secrets from them. However, Sinatra was his client, and therefore he would have to err on the side of ethics. “It would definitely put him in a tough spot on many occasions,” said an associate.
Frank and Barbara were remarried in a secret ceremony—or as Barbara put it, they “went off quietly”—in Palm Beach, Florida, in the spring of 1978. “It was romantic and fun and felt like yet another new beginning,” she would say years later. “From the day we were married, Frank had always referred to me as his ‘bride,’ and I suddenly felt like one again, in another lovely gown and with tropical flowers threaded through my hair.”
During their romantic trip to Palm Beach, the Sinatras were invited by Ted Kennedy to play tennis at the Kennedys’ summer compound there. The last time Frank took a suitor to the compound, it was Mia in 1965. While he and Teddy still weren’t the best of friends, the link they shared with JFK and the Camelot years always made them feel warmly toward one another; Frank enjoyed being in Ted’s company. (It’s worth mentioning that Kennedy would also annul his long marriage to Joan Kennedy, which had also produced three children; however, he received her permission to do so.) Typical of the sort of unusual invitations one might receive while visiting the Kennedys, Teddy invited Frank and Barbara to attend a private Catholic Mass in the sanctuary of his mother, Rose Kennedy’s, bedroom. By this time, Rose, who was seventy-three, had suffered a stroke and had lost the use of one of her eyes; she was wearing an eye patch. Barbara would recall that for the entire time she was in Rose’s bedroom, Rose would not stop staring at her with that one eye. It was so disconcerting, in fact, that Teddy suggested Barbara move away from Rose and closer to him. She relocated to another seat, “but the eye followed me.” It was just an odd little occurrence, but likely one the Sinatra daughters would have had a bit of a chuckle about.
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